Telecommunications providers typically offer an array of adjunct services in conjunction with basic telephone service. For example, legacy services such as directory assistance, call waiting, caller identification, and call forwarding, and multimedia services such as Push-to-Talk, Video on demand, VoIP, and presence are services that a subscriber may utilize. Adjunct services make telephone service more useful and generally increase the revenues of telecommunications service providers.
Various factors presently inhibit telecommunications service providers from offering more adjunct services and encouraging the use of adjunct services by a greater number of subscribers. One inhibiting factor is that each service must have relatively broad demand to the community of subscribers in order to be economically viable. Part of the reason for this is that services are typically developed, maintained and managed by the telecommunications provider at considerable expense. Another inhibiting factor is that the services may only be functional with the infrastructure platforms for which it was designed, thereby limiting the possibility of generating revenue through reuse and increasing platform migration costs. Adjunct services are typically fully deployed in the network of the service provider that is selling the service, which increases the overall cost of providing the service. Another inhibiting factor is that many adjunct services are manually initiated and static. Manual initiation, i.e., initiation by the actions of telephone company personnel each time the service is used such as traditional directory assistance, is relatively slow and costly. Static services, i.e., subscriptions for unlimited use of a service such as call forwarding for a recurring monthly charge, may not appeal to those who would use a service only once or even occasionally. It would therefore be desirable to solve these problems and facilitate economical provisioning of a greater variety adjunct services.